They say these things are down to match fixing but we have had players quite capable of doing the same without being bribed.
"They're looking to move some of their players to bigger leagues to good clubs. We said to them that we're not just a bus station, we're trying to build a legacy here, so if the players fit into this legacy then we're more than welcome to take them."
FIFA 23 won’t include the Russian national team or Russian clubs. The Qatar World Cup is included as a playable tournament though. That’s a bold statement for human rights…
beverley town's new signing https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/morning-dog-walk-leads-7-7367865 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniele_Mannini
OLIVER HOLT: Stockport County's remarkable revival is part of a renaissance for non-league football By Oliver Holt for the Mail on Sunday 22:31, 23 Jul 2022 , updated 22:38, 23 Jul 2022 Yes, I remember Aggborough. It was late April when Stockport County played there, unwontedly, on the last day of another miserable season. It was 2013 and the club were still in freefall, still coming to terms with the fact that they had lost their Football League status in 2011 after 106 unbroken years. The only way was down. All of us have memories of a moment we consider a low point for our club. That was mine. Eleven years after they had been in what is now the Championship, Stockport needed to beat Kidderminster Harriers to avoid relegation to the Conference North, the sixth tier of the English football pyramid. We lost 4-0. Some of our fans invaded the pitch and a Kidderminster player was attacked. The players were led off the pitch. Play was suspended for 31 minutes. The atmosphere in the away end was ugly and resentful and angry. The club had been betrayed or mismanaged by a series of owners and now it felt like they were dying. Police arrived, encircled the away end and drew their batons. My daughter’s hand gripped mine a little more tightly. She had just turned 11. please log in to view this image Back in the Eighties, when Stockport were in the old Fourth Division, I used to think falling out of the League would be the end of the world but the longer County stayed in the National League North and the National League, the more I realised that was foolishness and that, actually, non-League football embodies much of what is best about our game and its sense of community. Stockport’s 11 years out of the Football League gave me the chance to visit clubs such as Solihull Moors, Altrincham, Histon, Bromley, Wrexham, Chorley, Kidderminster, Brackley Town, Oxford City, Forest Green Rovers, Stalybridge Celtic and FC United of Manchester, proud clubs who had more soul than a lot of teams several divisions above them. Soul isn’t about how much money your club have or what division they are in and the truth is that Stockport’s years in the National League reinvigorated the club and reconnected them with their core support. It made people realise how precious they were to the community so that when their fortunes turned after years of being exploited, they were propelled upwards again by a surge of popular support. County got a huge slice of luck when local businessman Mark Stott bought the club and transformed every aspect of their infrastructure. please log in to view this image Stott, who last month wiped out the £7.7million the club owed him, invested money in new players but just as importantly, he showed how much he valued the loyalty of the supporters by making sweeping improvements to the facilities at Edgeley Park, which had been neglected for years. Stockport’s revival owes much to Stott and to the club’s manager, Dave Challinor, but it is also part of a bigger picture of a remarkable renaissance in non-League football. Wrexham averaged nearly 9,000 fans for games at the Racecourse Ground last season, Stockport more than 7,000, Notts County and Chesterfield more than 6,000 and Southend and Grimsby Town more than 5,000. A couple of months ago, more than 10,000 fans packed into the stadium to see Stockport beat Halifax Town and return to the Football League for the first time in 11 years. They will play their first match back in League Two next Saturday when Barrow visit Edgeley Park as a new English football season begins. Another capacity crowd of more than 10,000 is expected. Stott is expecting many of County’s home games to be sell-outs. The club have sold more than 5,500 season tickets for the coming campaign in League Two, more than they ever sold when County were in the second tier of the English game and hosting Manchester City. The club sold more than 3,000 shirts on the day they launched their new kit. ‘It’s been insane,’ says the County owner. ‘I know a lot of our fans don’t want City and United fans to migrate over but a lot of kids who are maybe between five and 15, their allegiances aren’t fully formed yet and maybe they will be starting to think that they would like to support their local team. People are a bit disillusioned with the big clubs, which helps to explain some of the attendances in the National League last season.’ please log in to view this image Manager Dave Challinor has helped guide Stockport County back into the Football League When Stott bought the club, he said he wanted Stockport to be in the Championship in seven years. ‘Two and a half years in and we’re in League Two,’ he says. ‘I might be wrong but we’ll get promoted to League One this season. But League One to the Championship is the biggest leap to make.’ Stott is brimming with optimism. Part of that is because television revenue leaps from £90,000 a season in the National League to £1.1m in League Two. Part of it is because County have strengthened a formidable squad. Part of it is because promotion to League Two means that league rules stop Stockport’s youth team players being poached by big clubs for nothing. Sign up for all the latest sports news… The club are to build a state-of-the-art academy facility and are to apply for planning permission to extend the Railway End at Edgeley Park. Eventually, the plan is for the stadium capacity to reach 20,000. The hope is that the club will attract more of the area’s talent. Phil Foden grew up a few hundred yards from Edgeley Park. ‘Sooner or later, this has to be sustainable,’ says Stott. ‘We have a great training ground. Manchester City won the Premier League training on that. We can become a powerful force locally for youngsters. The vision is to bring through local talent and fill the stadium every week.’ The home game with Barrow on Saturday is the next stage of the rebirth. It is all a long way from that April afternoon at Aggborough.
Final whistle for the ‘pink ’un’: British football’s last-surviving matchday newspaper closes Tim Adams please log in to view this image It’s been the slowest of deaths, but yesterday the “Saturday final” edition of a singular British institution will be just that. While in the last 20 years beloved pink ’uns and green ’uns (and the occasional blue ’un and buff ’un) have disappeared from towns and cities across the country, Portsmouth’s Saturday evening Sports Mail, 119 years old, held out as the last remaining dedicated matchday newspaper. It was first closed down in 2012 but quickly resurrected at the impassioned demand of fans of Pompey, the island city’s club. This time, the obituary is to be believed. With it goes a century of a particular collective memory: that Saturday evening ritual of heading up to the local newsagent at 5.30 or 5.45 to await the mundane miracle of a stack of fat papers slung from the back of a van reporting from all across the city what had ended only an hour before, ink still smudgeable on banner headlines. There were generally two categories of punter in those newsagent queues: kids like me who had biked up there to pick up a paper to take home in order to dissect awayday match reports with their dad (and later to pore over the implication of attendance statistics and substitutions), and men in Philip Larkin’s old-style hats and coats on their way home from the bookies or the boozer or the match, stamping their feet in the cold and grumbling that it was late this week, impatient for the moment they could run a finger down the classified scores and see if this time their pools numbers had finally come up – or if their Spot the Ball guess had been spot on. please log in to view this image The final issue of the Sports Mail. Just as the National Lottery did for the pools, so the internet has long done for the pink ’un. The impulse, mainly among men and boys, dads and lads, for team gossip, player ratings, transfer speculation, something to discuss in the pub or the workplace, has not diminished, but it is not now confined to teatime on a Saturday. It is, like everything else, always in your pocket or on your screen, searchable in the sleepless early hours, tweetable over a lunchtime sandwich. Like all news, unmoored from its allotted time and place, its pink or green physicality, it has lost a little of its specific magic. When I called Neil Allen, sports editor at the Portsmouth News one morning in the middle of last week, he was inevitably just filing some copy about Pompey for the website and promised to call back in quarter of an hour when it was done. He has worked on the Saturday paper for more than 20 years. He grew up waiting at the newsagent’s for Birmingham’s pink Sports Argus, the original of the genre, which had first had the idea of utilising that hour between matches ending and pubs opening to report on then all-conquering Aston Villa (and their Black Country rivals) in 1882, and only stopped in 2006. Allen had always tried to model the Portsmouth paper on that tradition, recalling the importance of the Argus’s peerless coverage of local non-leagues and amateur sports, cricket in the summer, old boys’ rugby, the way the whole ladder of a city’s competition from muddy local rec to manicured top-tier stadium could be found in one place. please log in to view this image Vendors selling matchday papers in London in 1936.Photograph: HF Davis/Getty Images Rupert Murdoch’s media empire did for the papers to begin with. Sky Sports’ insistence that the Premier League happened all week and not just at 3pm on a Saturday left far too many pastel pages yawning. No point in producing the sports paper for a five o’clock kick-off if the newsagents would be closed when the match ended. “That was a total pain when Portsmouth were in the Premier League,” Allen says, “but it’s still mostly 3 o’clocks in the lower leagues.” The real issue is online. What kid could be persuaded to get a bike out to wait in the cold to buy something that they can scroll to on the sofa? The original stay of execution for the Portsmouth paper came about in 2013 because closure coincided with the fans’ buyout of Pompey, which was facing liquidation. The Evening Mail was reborn as part of that emotional moment, the local paper bonding with local supporters. It pledged to stay in business just as long as supporters pledged to buy it, with a percentage of the sale price going back to the club. There has been a similar kind of nostalgic response to news of the demise this time around, Allen says, but mainly from the club’s supporters who regretted not keeping up their side of the bargain. “It’s just time to change,” Allen says. “It’s nobody’s fault.” please log in to view this image A 1901 Football Evening News. Sports newspapers had their heyday in the 20th century. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images One thing that hasn’t changed for Allen and his colleagues is the final-whistle adrenaline that accompanies match reports, but these days it’s a slightly lonelier business. He still has to get his thousand words and his player ratings done for the website on the final whistle, but these days it’s just him and his laptop, no soothing presence of a copytaker down the phone, chuckling at your jokes, wincing at your purple prose. You could measure the progress of technology in the medium by which news made it to sports papers. Frank Keating, the great Guardian sports writer, once recalled how before his first shift on the Gloucester Citizen’spink’un, the paper’s Dickensian editor took him up to the office roof to show him “the crumbling remains of the pigeon-cote where, decades before, matchday copy would arrive”. He was reminded of one of Arnold Bennett’s Tales of the Five Towns, when a frantic subeditor was required to unfastens scores from a bird’s leg: “Midland Fed: Axe Utd v Macclesfield Tn. Fog. Match Abandoned 3.45.” These days the only frantic fingers, Allen suggests, are his own, when the sports reporter’s worst nightmare happens and a last-minute equaliser makes everything written redundant. “It’s so much harder to rewrite when you are typing rather than talking,” he says. If the medium is constantly evolving, the message tends to remain familiar. The final edition of the Mail looks ahead to Portsmouth’s prospects for the coming season, its last printed word on the club. How are things shaping up? I wonder. “Not that promising,” Allen confesses. “The season kicks off next week and they haven’t got a single senior striker on the books.”
takes me back to college days. the best player i ever saw reckoned i was the best defender he'd faced. haven't had any practice in decades.
